Document Category: Age

This motion seeks public funding for a juvenile brain-development expert to explain how developmental immaturity affects a young person’s ability to assess risk, anticipate consequences, and foresee that participation in an underlying felony could result in death. Written in the context of a New York felony-murder prosecution, the motion argues that foreseeability is central to determining whether a death occurred “in furtherance of” the felony and that adolescent neurodevelopment is beyond ordinary jurors’ common knowledge. It relies on research concerning the late development of the prefrontal cortex, heightened reward sensitivity, impulsivity, and the developmental mismatch between cognitive-control and emotional systems. The motion further argues that expert assistance is necessary to protect an indigent client’s due-process, equal-protection, and right-to-present-a-defense interests. An optional section extends the analysis to emerging adults between ages eighteen and twenty-one, whose brains continue developing in areas governing impulse control and risk assessment.

This motion seeks suppression of statements obtained from a juvenile through deceptive interrogation tactics, false evidence claims, and/or promises or suggestions of leniency. It argues that courts must evaluate voluntariness under the totality of the circumstances, giving particular weight to the client’s age, maturity, education, developmental or mental-health vulnerabilities, experience with law enforcement, interrogation conditions, and comprehension of Miranda rights. Drawing on adolescent-development research, the motion explains that youth are more susceptible to authority, more focused on escaping immediate stress, less able to assess long-term consequences, and consequently at heightened risk of involuntary waivers and false confessions. It also surveys law-enforcement guidance and state statutes recognizing the dangers of using deception against children. The motion argues that statements elicited through deception or inducements should be presumed involuntary or, alternatively, that the court should conduct a hearing requiring the prosecution to prove voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt.

This appellate brief argues that mandatory LWOP for an 18-year-old Latine individual violates the California Constitution because LWOP is disproportionately imposed on young people of color. Citing social science and sentencing data, the brief explains how racial stereotypes shape extreme sentencing outcomes that disproportionately expose young Black and Latine people to LWOP. The brief also raises California Racial Justice Act claims based on racially coded gang evidence and courtroom language, citing research on implicit bias, dehumanization, anti-Latine stereotypes, and the historical conflation of Latine identity with gangs and criminality. It challenges testimony treating Spanish, baggy clothes, tattoos, and Latine ethnicity as gang indicators, as well as judicial references to “mad dogging” and “savages.”

This brief argues that mandatory life without parole sentences are unconstitutional for people up to age 20 because late adolescents experience significant brain, behavioral, and psychological change similar to adolescents. The brief details brain development occurring from age 18-20 (pp. 3-12), explains how late adolescents are more vulnerable to risk taking and peer influence than adults (pp. 13-16), demonstrates that the brains and decision-making abilities of late adolescents are virtually indistinguishable from children under age 18 (pp. 17-21), describes how adversity slows neurocognitive development (pp. 21-35), and applies Michigan’s four-factor test for determining if punishment is cruel or unusual to 18 to 20 year olds (pp. 25-31).

This amicus brief argues that mandatory term-of-years sentences that deny juvenile offenders a meaningful opportunity for release function as unconstitutional life-without-parole sentences under the Eighth Amendment. Relying on Miller v. Alabama, Graham v. Florida, and Jones v. Mississippi, the brief contends that constitutional analysis must focus on the real-world effect of the imposed sentence rather than the label. It explains how mandatory minimums, sentencing enhancements, and parole practices can combine to impose de facto life sentences on juveniles absent the procedural protections required for imposing an LWOP under Miller. The brief incorporates empirical research on diminished life expectancy for incarcerated people—especially those sentenced as youth—to demonstrate that long mandatory sentences effectively condemn juveniles to die in prison.

This draft motion section relies on psychological and neuroscientific research to argue that young people who have been exposed to trauma behave differently when interrogated and are more likely to give false, unreliable, and involuntary confessions such that past exposure to trauma should be an important factor in the voluntariness analysis.

Pages 2-3:  Youth with trauma histories are quicker to perceive subtle threats from interrogators.

Pages 3-4: They are more sensitive to environmental stressors

Pages 4-5:  They are more distressed when they perceive threats leading to over- and under-reactions

Pages 5-6:  They often give in to authority figures and confess to avoid additional trauma

Pages 6-7:  They are more susceptible to police interrogation tactics like maximization and minimization.

Pages 7-11:  These pages discuss other potential uses of this emerging research, including (a) a request for funding to retain an expert to explain how a client’s trauma symptomatology may have manifested during an interrogation; (b) arguments that prior trauma exposure should be considered when determining whether an adolescent was in custody and being interrogated; and (c) arguments that prior trauma may affect the voluntariness of a Miranda waiver.

This draft sentencing argument is one-page long and relies on three studies to demonstrate that when young people (including people up to age 24) are exposed to violence (gun-related or not), it substantially increases the likelihood that  they will later carry guns because they are afraid and feel they need the gun for self-protection and to protect their loved ones.  This data could also be used to argue in pre-trial release hearings that youth charged with firearms-related offenses are not necessarily dangerous.

This Amicus Brief, filed by the Juvenile Law Center; Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior, the Sentencing Project; and the Children’s Policy and Law Initiative of Indiana argues that long term-of-year sentences imposed on juveniles are tantamount to life without parole and are therefore unconstitutional.  Pages 8-11 discuss the neuroscience behind the development of the prefrontal cortex and explain how brain science shows that adolescents’ long-term planning skills, emotional regulation abilities, impulse control, ability to evaluate risk and reward, and susceptibility to peer pressure are all still developing into a person’s twenties.  Pages 12-13 discuss how these characteristics are transient and show that youth with antisocial tendencies, violent behaviors, and impaired empathy often improve significantly in their mid-twenties.  Pages 13-15 discuss the connection between trauma and brain development, explaining how youth who are chronically traumatized and left alone often have documented difficulty with emotional regulation traceable to inhibited brain development.  The research relied on in this amicus brief could be useful to defenders representing anyone under the age of twenty-five to argue for mitigation in sentencing.

Filed by the American Psychological Association, this brief overviews specific interrogation techniques (maximization, minimization, and sleep deprivation) that contribute to false confessions, as well as research showing that young people are particularly likely to falsely confess.

Pgs. 7-8 – summarize scientific research describing how people create entirely false memories, a study of false memory creation, and a list of false memory risk factors, particularly for children.

Pgs. 9-10 – explain how interview techniques can create false memories in children, even false memories that do not seem to directly relate to the questions asked by the interviewer, and why expert testimony is needed to educate the jury on the counterintuitive nature of memory creation (i.e., the more detailed a memory, the higher the likelihood of error).

Pgs. 12-14 argue that, because the science behind false memories is similar to that of mistaken eyewitness identifications and both require jury education to evaluate witness credibility, expert testimony on false memories should be admitted at the discretion of the trial judge under the same logic.

p. 18 – 23 incorporate research about the high susceptibility of adolescents to persuasion, especially by police. Amici argues that this makes adolescents more likely than adults to give false information to authority figures. Includes research on how adolescents respond to authority under stress.

This NAACP amicus brief argues that Missouri’s parole procedures are unconstitutional as applied to juveniles,  because they do not provide juveniles with a meaningful opportunity to obtain release (leading to de facto life without parole sentences). Pages 10-13 rely on statistics to show that  race affects sentencing and that Black men and boys are punished with more severe penalties than their white counterparts. Pages 13-14 document research showing how racial stereotypes of Black men and boys as violent affect peoples’ behaviors and attitudes toward them. Pages 14-15 discuss research showing that judges are not immune to implicit racial biases. The studies discussed in this amicus brief could be useful to defenders who want to highlight the problems of racial bias (explicit and implicit) in sentencing in order to prevent such biases from infecting sentencing decisions.

This post-conviction brief cautions against crediting a juvenile’s custodial statements. Drawing on social science and U.S. Supreme Court precedent recognizing that youth are more vulnerable to pressure, more compliant with authority, and less capable of understanding long-term consequences, the brief explains that adolescents are disproportionately susceptible to suggestion and false confession. It details how factors such as isolation, leading questioning, minimization tactics, exposure to evidence, and failure to ensure meaningful comprehension of Miranda warnings undermine the voluntariness and reliability of juvenile admissions.

This sentencing memorandum marshals empirical research about the typical profile and risk assessment of someone convicted of possessing child pornography, along with research related to the client’s age and the impact of incarceration on recidivism/deterrence, to argue that the client is not dangerous or likely to reoffend. These arguments could also be used pretrial in a bond argument.

Pgs. 26-27: An older person will suffer greater punishment from incarceration than the average person incarcerated

Pgs. 29-30: The empirical evidence shows no relationship between sentence length and general/specific deterrence

Pgs. 31-33, 46, 51-52: Empirical research shows that first-time child pornography possession offenders have a very low risk of sexual recidivism and the consumption of child pornography alone does not seem to represent a risk factor for committing contact sex offenses

Pgs. 33-34: Marriage reduces recidivism as does employment, education and family ties/responsibilities

Pgs. 33, 51: Recidivism (including for child sex offenders) declines with age, and only a very few child sex offenders recidivate after age 60

Pgs. 22-23, 47: Because of the ease of accessing child porn on the internet, there is no evidence that the number of images possessed bears on the likelihood that an offender is “dangerous” or more likely to engage in contact sex crimes

Pgs. 21, 47-50: Harsher punishment for child porn consumption will not reduce the flow of child porn on the internet because there is no empirical evidence to support the assumption that children are abused for the sole purpose of creating child pornography for dissemination (i.e., the consumption of child porn alone has no “market effect”)

Pgs. 52-53: Collects research discussing the criminogenic effects of prison